I agree that the main thing causing lack of growth of bitcoin is that it is just a geeky pain in the ass not geared towards the common person and the common person would not even understand a need / use for it except maybe for two things right now:
#1 silk road
College kids find out about silk road, which only takes bitcoin, which leads them to find out about bitcoin and want to buy stuff. It is ridiculous but this is probably the number one thing holding the bitcoin to any real value right now because why in the hell would you go through all the hoops and hassles for anything else? Wire money to some strange internet company you no nothing about to get a weird intermediate currency / commodity to buy what? Overpriced socks and bad dry and canned food? Why not just BUY the stuff with your currency.
Silk road will never catch on because college students already have a place where it is extremely easy and safe to buy drugs, it's called college.
Luckily for Silk Road, the majority of drug users in the world (that is, the majority of people, most of whom are drug users in one way or another) aren't in college. And as of today this forum has 38,053 members, while Silk Road has about 30,000. So yeah... sounds like a real flop.